How to recycle a three-and-a-half-tonne tyre

Wednesday, 20 April, 2016

How to recycle a three-and-a-half-tonne tyre

Green Distillation Technologies (GDT), the developer of a process to recycle end-of-life car and truck tyres, was recently faced with the challenge of handling extra-large ‘off the road’ (OTR) tyres used by heavy-duty mining dump trucks, large agricultural tractors and road-making equipment.

It was estimated in 2013–14 that there are 155,000 tonnes of OTR end-of-life tyres of various sizes generated in Australia each year. 79.4% of these are left on-site, with no means of recycling them. The usual means of disposal is burial on a mine site or in an EPA-nominated dump.

GDT technology has the ability to recycle end-of-life car and truck tyres into oil, carbon and steel using a destructive distillation process. A tyre weighing 3.5 tonnes could yield 1500 L of oil and 1.5 tonnes of carbon, as well as the steel reinforcing to go back to the tyre manufacturer for re-use.

The CEO of GDT, Craig Dunn, said the company recently signed an agreement with Perth-based Tytec Logistics, which provides logistics, storage and remanufacturing for OTR tyres. He revealed that the company faced some difficulty with the handling of oversized tyres, defined as having rim sizes ranging from 25 to 63″.

“Our first concepts have entailed placing our processing chamber horizontal to the ground, rather than the vertical position used for recycling car and truck tyres, and using a forklift and tractor to feed the OTR tyres into the chamber,” he said. “That approach appears to work quite well, but we need to make it more mechanised.”

Dunn said the test plant for the world’s first processing plant for OTR tyres is currently being built at the GDT complex in Warren, western NSW. The first OTR operating plant, to be based in Perth, will follow in 2017.

“We believe that after the first operating plant has been built in Perth, there will be a need for other OTR plants in Australia, as well as the United States and South America,” Dunn said.

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